If shopping feels more like a hassle than it used to, that’s because it probably is.
More American stores are doing with fewer employees and many have locked items up to keep them from being pilfered. With slowing sales and rising theft eating into profits, the risk is that retailers’ countermeasures will make in-person shopping even more miserable than it already is. In the best case scenario, that will shift sales to their own e-commerce sites, worsening margins. But it could also just shift shoppers to better-staffed competitors or pure online retailers like Amazon.
It doesn’t help that retailers have faced the steepest annual wage growth since the 1980s. Average wages for nonsupervisory employees in the retail sector rose about 24% in July compared with the same period in 2019 to $20.54 per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The retail industry slashed head count in 2020 and has never returned to prepandemic staffing levels. While the number of U.S. retail establishments was 1.5% higher in 2022 than 2019, the number of retail sales workers fell 12% over that period, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The number of total employees per store was down by about a fifth at both Macy’s and Kohl’s last year compared with 2019, for example. Apparel retailers Abercrombie & Fitch and Gap reduced their head counts per store by 25% and 14%, respectively. At Best Buy, staffing declined 22%. A spokesman for Gap said the measure isn’t representative of service levels at its stores and that the change in its head count included meaningful reductions in corporate staffing. For most companies, employee counts include corporate and warehouse staff, so it isn’t a perfect picture of how in-store staffing has changed, but store workers make up the majority of most retailers’ workforces.
Some jobs are gone for good: Many retailers have installed self-checkout systems or have closed large stores in favor of more productive, smaller-footprint ones that require fewer employees.